“Flightplan” is a movie that takes a premise that would make a good “Twilight Zone” episode but can’t sustain itself long enough to be a suitable concept for a feature-length film and therefore has to switch its style later on, making it just plain silly.

In “Flightplan”, Kyle Pratt (Jodie Foster “Silence of the Lambs”) is with her daughter Julia as they fly to America to take the body of Kyle’s husband back home to be buried. After a while Kyle falls asleep and when she awakens Julia is missing with there being no evidence of her ever being on the plane, making this a bit like the movie “Unknown”. It should be thrilling but it ends up being goofy.

Jodie Foster takes the role very seriously but the script has her do such stupid things as accuse Arab men of being terrorists and also finding a way to the plane’s main computer systems from the bathrooms. Peter Sarsgaard (“Green Lantern”) plays a law enforcer on-board but the character becomes so obvious and weak. I like the captain of the plane played really well by Sean Bean (“GoldenEye”). The other passengers aren’t too exciting but we don’t see too much of them so maybe very little effort went into creating them.

The film takes an interesting idea and gives us some genuine suspense for a bit but it runs out of steam quickly and the last part of the film involves gunfights and explosions (some realistic thriller, right?). A successful intense film set in a claustrophobic environment was “Phone Booth” and if someone can make a movie using a phone booth as the setting interesting for the whole movie then why can’t the same be done for a plane? If this film is going to be this silly it needs to take notes from the juvenile yet fun plane outing named “Passenger 57”.